Page 4 of Burning Hearts

Jamie reached the top of the ridge and stopped at the apex of the deer trail she’d been walking up, refusing to get distracted by the amazing view. Or the hint of smoke on the breeze and the cloud cover that might be more the haze of wildfire smoke than an indication that precipitation was in the forecast.

Of course they knew where she was.

“Not that I meant to locate you. I just happened to log in to the system to take a look and saw you’d signed one out.”

“It’s fine, Samuel. Probably a good thing, actually.”

She didn’t keep much of her personal life from her board. She just didn’t work that way. No one else in her life whom she would consider a friend or acquaintance knew what she did—not really. It was either boring to them or too complex to fully understand when no one wanted to know that much about niche investing anyway.

But the people she worked with? Jamie trusted Samuel implicitly.

The rest of the board could find her whenever, wherever, if they needed something. She was always available, because she’d learned the hard way what happened when she took her hands off the reins. Too often they found out much too late that they’d hired someone who couldn’t be trusted.

Samuel said, “I believe the wildland smokejumper who created the tech, Jade Ransom, is a team leader with the Midnight Sun smokejumpers. Their base isn’t too far from your current location—at least, according to Alaska standards.”

Jamie wasn’t going to pay them a visit, even for the purpose of shaking the hand of her newest client. She much preferred to be the anonymous CEO behind the curtain. “Anything else on the schedule?”

Her CFO cleared his throat and went over the effect of a server going down the month before. A problem their tech people had solved quickly, but the ramifications were still being unpacked. At times ad nauseum.

Jamie half listened to him talking and took in the vista in front of her. Sprawling hills on the other side of the valley stretched up as if they were trying to compete with Denali for superiority but came up far short.

On the valley floor, there seemed to be some kind of fenced compound. Multiple buildings, huge metal structures, Quonset huts. Mobile homes and cabins, vehicles everywhere—ATVs, UTVs that looked like hyped-up off-road golf carts, and trucks. So many trucks. She spotted a couple of loose dogs roaming around. Almost every person down there seemed to be male, though she did see a couple of women.

“Uh…that’s everything, Ms. Winters.”

She focused back on her call. “Thank you, Mr. Penning.”

Samuel adjourned the meeting and told her not to hang up. She held the phone to her ear, the bulky satellite unit warm against her cheek. Jamie watched the movement below, trying to figure out their organizational pattern. Like watching ants in a terrarium.

How was she going to find her brother in there, short of marching in the front gate and demanding to see him?

“Can you hear me?” Samuel’s voice was a lot closer now, like he’d taken her off speaker and held the handset to his ear.

Jamie looked at the dusty toes of her hiking boots. “Yes. And before you ask, I’m fine.”

“At least you didn’t try to tell me that you know what you’re doing.”

They both knew she was in over her head. “Thank you for keeping things going while I’m out of town.”

She worked from home a lot, in the converted basement of her upper-middle-class house. Because no one needed to come over to a mansion to watch a movie and eat pizza. Jamie had always wanted to be normal. To be treated like everyone else. If that meant she had to hide some parts of who she was…

What was the problem? It was her business, not theirs.

Samuel said, “Are you really sure your brother warrants this much effort?”

“You already know the answer to that.”

“I wish you’d taken my advice about a security team.”

Because she wanted to be a lone woman in Alaska surrounded by a team of expensive bodyguards? Talk about obvious. There was no way to slip in and out without many people noticing, or keep a low profile in general, if she had a team of people on her twenty-four seven.

Samuel sighed because she wasn’t going to argue. She also wasn’t going to tell him she would be all right no matter what. Jamie just didn’t want to drag anyone else into her family mess.

Her relationship with Logan had proven to her that people outside her family didn’t understand their dynamic. He hadn’t liked the fact she was all in to help her mother and her brother. She cared about them too much to let them throw their lives away, and if that meant getting messy trying to pull either her addict mother or her wayward brother out of whatever jam they were in, she would do it.

“Please, be careful. We don’t want to lose you,” Samuel said. “After all, if you disappear, it will affect the bottom line.”

Jamie grinned. He cared. He just knew getting soft wasn’t what their company needed. “Of course. I wouldn’t want to affect next quarter’s projections.”

---